In a follow up to my article last week about a trip to see the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry’s Mythbustersexhibit where I noticed some mythbusting of OMSI’s own at Life Hall, I also noticed some myth perpetuation in Earth Hall. Policy mythmaking centers on the problem of obtaining political consent when a prescribed policy is too far outside the core values of the average voter. Complex arguments involving esoteric and distasteful premises get replaced by an easier, more attractive, but factually challenged narrative for public consumption. Without this deceptive framing of an issue, elite insiders worry that their goals could never attract popular support so they compensate accordingly.

The left wing professor of linguistics at MIT Noam Chomsky coined a term for this phenomenon: manufacturing consent. Of course he was writing about foreign policy, attempting to explain the popularity of the Cold War by showing how established elites craft a catchy narrative and reinforce it throughout the mainstream media and major cultural institutions (such as museums) to regulate public opinion. The application of this concept of his can be seen in several other policy areas, none of which is more salient than environmental policy.

OMSI’s Earth Hall currently hosts an exhibit that serves as a glaring case study of policy mythmaking in the pursuit of manufactured consent. Financed by stakeholders in the government subsidy of alternative forms of electric generation like wind turbine maker Vestas and solar panel maker Solarworld, this paid advertisement perpetuates the biggest whopper of the green tech gravy train, that the reduced use of cheaper fossil fuels will be better for economic growth. This exhibit comes complete with a large set of building blocks for kids to assemble the asserted three pillars of alternative energy, that it’s not just better for the environment, it’s better for society, and even better for the economy too.

There are no doubt many negative externalities associated with the extraction, transportation, and consumption of fossil fuels. An objective, science-focused exhibit should lay them out for all to see, but there is also a massive bounty of positive externalities that come with fossil fuel utilization as well. OMSI’s exhibit ignores them. When society reduces the negative externalities of fossil fuels it also loses their positive externalities, incurring a substantial net opportunity cost since the economic benefits of the latter are many times greater than the costs of the former.

A truly scientific exhibit would do more than just lay out all the environmental costs that come from our use of coal, oil, and gas. Even if it were to include the advocacy that we as a society should accept an economic tradeoff by substantially reducing our standard of living to protect the environment, to remain scientific on this matter, OMSI needs to honestly display those costs. The full social implications we face for moving towards a reliance on extremely expensive, low yielding forms of electric generation are far easier to measure than the results of over-determined complexity in climate models that make macroeconomics look like an exact science by comparison.

A war on cars for example will have enormous economic collateral damage. The failure to spend the user- generated revenue of gas taxes and vehicle registration fees on maintaining and expanding our roads will have a serious negative impact on real people’s lives. For all the talk of a new bridge across the Columbia River, not far away we find scarce transportation dollars quietly being blown on the construction of a new bridge across the Willamette River that intentionally won’t even allow cars. Channeling people into the use of a slow, low capacity mode of transportation like MAX will negatively affect real peoples’ mobility.

Check out this video from the exhibit:

Notice how it claims allowing cars to cross the new bridge would increase both pollution and traffic jams. This is intentionally deceptive. Creating more capacity for vehicular travel will reduce traffic jams not increase them. This is somewhat related to an analogy commonly cited by Metro planners in public, that expanding our highway infrastructure is like a fat person buying ever larger belts. This is a false analogy, failing to expand our roads in a modest sized city like Portland as we grow in population is more analogous to failing to buy a new belt for a growing teenager. Economic growth brings with it not fat but simply the need for greater freeway capacity.

Amongst themselves Metro planners are more candid. “Congestion is our friend” they tell each other as plans are hatched to force people out of their cars. To reduce pollution we have to coerce people out of their preferred means of transportation and onto MAX by making it more and more difficult to get around by car. Manufacturing consent requires the reduction of peoples’ overwhelming choice in the name of adding more choices; it requires intentionally creating more traffic jams while telling the common folk we are trying to reduce traffic jams.

To ignore the devastating economic tradeoff of such reduced mobility amounts to myth creation. It’s an attempt to hide a thinly supported ideology from popular scrutiny. The throughput capacity for MAX is so astonishingly low, and its speed is so frustratingly slow, there would be huge lines waiting to get on and off crowded trains if anything beyond the tiny fraction of our local population that uses MAX today began riding them. The pollution from cars is very real and has continued to decline even as more people ride in them, but the motor vehicle’s unrivaled efficiency at moving people around a city remains irreplaceable and the negative economic consequences of disrupting a city’s real transportation needs far exceed the actual costs of the additional pollution Metro planners are trying to reduce.

Does OMSI’s exhibit mention any of this? No, instead it includes a small mock up of a MAX train encouraging more people to ride them.

Efficient transportation options don’t require propaganda like this. Maintaining the actual infrastructure we need to grow as a city does not require the manufacture of consent.

The subsidy and cartelization of alternative energy and light rail is certainly good economically for those who stand to profit from the public’s expense at Vestas and Solarworld, but not for society at large. Whether or not we should accept that tradeoff is one thing, allowing these stakeholders to use OMSI as a propaganda tool to trick people into thinking no such tradeoff exists is another.

Relying on myth to hide their ideology, Metro’s agenda is actually quite vulnerable even in Oregon. It will just take some empirical exposure, some intellectual sunshine to disinfect the pervasive top-down propaganda. OMSI is great, but don’t expect it to do that job anytime soon in the area of environmental policy. Fortunately our state has some mythbusters of our own at the Cascade Policy Institute. Invest in freedom by donating here.

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Beautiful sunshine is this article! Oregon governance is off track badly with the adoption of forced, top down bureaucratic economic and social planning. This top down governance is expensive, increasingly dependent on specious federal money transfers, and causes an economic malaise (economic growth much below potential). This governance model is great if your a public employee union, because such a model is easily made captive to such focused monopolistic force – one that has no effective countervailing force to balance economic interests more broadly (A Galbraithism, no less). But even for the latter (government employee unions), severe economic underperformance eventually catches it just as northern based Automobile Industry unions (with management resigned to such) got taken out by other more competitive auto plant locations. So, now in Oregon you have the government employee unions continually asking for hikes in tax rates, or new tax forms, all in effort to make up for the economic malaise. After measures 66 and 67 fail to stem the tide of government employee union demands, they hit this legislative session for sharply more tax revenue. Nike saw this coming, and screamed (just as many of us others currently but without economic muscle to be heard): “we don’t want a tax cut, but we need and want tax rate stability and tax form certainty.”

valley person

Eric, just because there is a consensus in the Portland area to balance transit, cycling and walking with driving doesn’t mean it was manufactured. You are probably too young to remember, but Portland was a polluted, congested mess with a dying downtown in the 1970s. It was the people themselves who changed this by stopping the Mt Hood freeway and electing a young mayor who brought them a light rail line instead.

Metro and other governments came along only much later, after the public demanded something other than more road capacity. Invoking Chomsky is not the right frame here. What you see in Portland today is the result of a bottom up reaction against an auto dominated bias, not a top-down imposition.

JacklordGod

Noam Chomsky – This guy used to be considered such a nut, even left wing bookstores would warn you “watch out, nut” when trying to buy his books. Only a loon like Chomsky could think the Cold War required manufactured consent ( I assume he felt the Berlin Wall was just a weird aberration). Then again, his concept of manufactured consent is apt. I rarely take my kids to a museum, OMSI included, where I haven’t seen the sorts of one sided exhibits mentioned.

I’m sure all of us have seen them, exhibits that show the damage of oil on the environment and that sort of thing. Not once have I ever seen on the other wall an interpretation of the economic devastation that would be caused by getting rid of fossil fuels. I suppose that’s one good thing about the long ride back from OMSI, plenty of time to discuss with the kids what would happen if the looney’s got their way.

You know what I find works well? Point out to kids that the loons tend to want us to pay for “externalities” which generally means them thinking up a dream list of what kind of money they want, and demanding you pay it in the form of fuel taxes to offset your “externalies”

“When the kids ask “well gee dad, why is that a load of crap?”

“Simple kids – the crazies always want to remedy everything with a tax, they claim they will use that money to solve the problem, but you know what they do? They take that money and then spend it on the projects they really want, which nobody else wants and they could never get a tax increase for. It’s the old switcheroo kids, and you watch out for it.”

“Wow dad, that sounds really conspiratorial”

“Hey kids, Im glad you know that word! But you know what, it isn’t conspiratorial at all, it’s fact”

“How do you know it’s fact Dad when they haven’t gotten the tax to misuse yet?”

“Simple kids – you know something like a decade ago there was a tobacco settlement and Oregon got like a gagillion dollars?”

“OK”

“You know they were supposed to spend a lot of that money on kids smoking prevention programs, and if you opposed that then you hated kids?”

“OK”

“Guess how much they spent on those programs?”

“How much dad?”

“Zero. They took the money and gave out raises to fat cats that work in state government.”

“Zowie dad! Really. So that means those people not only hate kids by their own definition, but they are really just looking to rip people off, they care less about the environment than the oil companies, they just want money to spend on themselves.”

“Wow, that’s right kids! You guys are really learning. OK now who wants a beer?”

DavidAppell

So you don’t think those who cause damage to the Commons should pay for it?

Care to defend that position? In particular, would you care if I eliminated my waste disposal fees by dumping my garbage into your back yard? Why or why not?

DavidAppell

Eric: Your writing is so burdened with ideology as to be nearly impenetrable.

Back off telling readers what they’re supposed to think, and try convincing them with the quality of your arguments. You’ll be surprised what a difference it will make.